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Nightingale 1.12.1 is finally released! Existing installations of the last release version of Nightingale (1.12) on Windows or Mac OS X will give you the opportunity to automatically update to the new version. For Linux users the packages are updated; if you installed from a tarball on Linux you’ll have to update by grabbing a new one from the download page.

What’s new?

We cleaned up quite a bit: More legacy code from Songbird was removed or disabled, thus we expect the release to be more stable. There are also some bugs fixed, such as the Unity integration causing a crash in Ubuntu 13.04, battery drain in OS X Lion or newer and playback not properly updating the play counts.

As mentioned in a previous blog post, freaktechnik implemented some beautiful firstrun pages, which will present you changes after updates or overall information on the very first start. Through our newly introduced statistics page, this will also help us to track installations and upgrades to find update-related issues. Note that if you dislike the firstrun page, you can visit about:config and set the preference ‘nightingale.update.url’ to ”.

Additionally, GeekShadow implemented a new localization infrastructure and will contact past Songbird translators. He got rid of the last Songbird references, and thanks to our translators and reviewers many locales were improved quite a lot. However, there are still some locales without maintainers; and even if your locale already has one it would be great if you volunteer for proofreading and translating Nightingale’s strings! When updating, you may need to re-download the language packs for this change to take effect.

We also did some backend work switching to a new update infrastructure, as Google Code shuts down its downloads section. Updates are now handled through GitHub, where we also keep our main source code repository. An issue preventing Linux updates got fixed as well, so you should be able to auto-update from tarballs in the future.

As this is our first release after the shutdown of Songbird we replaced everything provided through Songbird infrastructure with our own services. To see everything we changed in 1.12.1, check out the official release notes.

The IDs of some add-ons changed, namely mashTape, SHOUTcast and Last.fm. This means Nightingale will find new add-ons and ask you, if you want to install them. Since the ID changed, they will not override the existing extensions. The previous versions of those add-ons will show up in the extensions manager as incompatible with Nightingale 1.12.1 and can be uninstalled.

Unity and libnotify integration have been split up into two optional components. Thanks to this the nightingale-nounity package now also includes libnotify integration. For those who don’t want, or can’t use our PPA, we still offer GNOME/Unity integration builds.

Enjoy the latest version of Nightingale, update or install it and listen to your favorite songs. We’d love to hear your feedback in the forums or on the IRC channel, #nightingale on irc.mozilla.org. As always, we’re looking for testers, developers, theme makers, and users to idle in our forums and IRC, not to mention help out with the project. Feel free to join!

We’re pleased to announce that Nightingale 1.12 is finally available for download! Existing installations of the last release version of Nightingale (1.11.0) will give you the opportunity to automatically update – this will be the first time we’ve ever used our update system. It may or may not work depending on your OS, and how you have Nightingale configured. We hope everything works great, but if it doesn’t let us know, and grab a regular build.

What’s new?

Most importantly, we moved to a cleaner backend. For you, that means Nightingale is more stable; on Linux, it means you use more of your system’s own libraries. This release also brings us closer to using more recent libraries. Behind the scenes, we’re already planning the next release which will use a current xulrunner, delivering more features and performance. Such an upgrade is a very large project, and as such we could use more developers. Feel free to pitch in!

We have also cleaned up our installer for Windows, which no longer requires administrative privileges. We moved it to a completely new backend and designed it to be much simpler from the developers’ point of view. Working in the old system was quite a pain!

Another platform specific change is LookingMan’s Unity Integration – Nightingale is now able to integrate into Gnome and Unity audio menus and notification systems, a much requested feature that we are very happy to have available for you.

Independent of your platform, there are a number of new and ported addons, some from Songbird, others from scratch. One new addon includes GeekShadow’s fixed and updated port of the SoundCloud addon, a feature any self-respecting player should have.

While we work on version 2.0, this release should last for a while. A large reson being the last big change between 1.11 and 1.12: we fixed tons of issues. From crashing issues on Windows and Ubuntu to cosmetic issues like Nightingale opening with an empty tab – this new version fixes many old issues. We have also improved the branding a bit, updated the locales and made some tweaks – read a full list of changes in the Changelog.

We hope you enjoy the new version; update or install it and enjoy some music! We’d love to hear your feedback in the forums or on the IRC channel, #nightingale on moznet. We’re always looking for testers, developers, theme makers, and users to idle in our forums and IRC, not to mention help out with the project. Feel free to join!

A lot of interesting work has been done behind the scenes since the last blog post. Even though we’re still low on developers (are you a dev? we’re still searching!), ilikenwf and Mook made many steps in the direction of building with a more current, vanilla XULrunner. Non-technically speaking, that means making Nightingale much faster and more reliable, with more addons and support for newer web services. I (rjtdrjgfuzkfg) just finished working on the fix for the only blocker issue we had with 1.11.

We finally have working Windows builds using a recent version of taglib (read: builds without the annoying crash issue) and that means that the basic porting for using a newer, vanilla taglib is done. Now we need your support – please download the testing build and try it out to see if everything works as expected. A huge part of the metadata handling code was rewritten, so we need to test it thoroughly. Please report any issues and all the successes you run into in the forums or at the github issue tracker, so we can fix them in preparation for releasing the next version!

We will also be working on using system taglib support on Linux, which would reduce the number of bundled dependencies, making Nightingale even more lightweight. Linux builds of the current taglib changes are not yet available due to the required dependency rebuild, but they should be rolling out very soon!

Speaking of 1.11.1, we’re moving in the direction of releasing the second and probably last release from the current code branch. There are many bugs fixed already, and we’re looking forward to publishing them in a stable build soon. Again, we need your help testing, so make sure and let us know if you see something that is not ready yet or broken.

We’re happy to announce the release of Nightingale 1.11.0 for Linux, Windows and (drumroll, please…) Mac OS X! You can download this new release from the front page. If you choose, you can also build it yourself by checking out the source from GitHub or Sourceforge and running build.sh.

What’s new?

Based off of the latest Songbird changes, providing better performance

We welcome any addons you port yourself to be added to our addons page – just let us know on the forums, or here in the comments!

Migrating From Nightingale 1.8

If you already use the old 1.8 version, there is no update available – we apologize. In fact, since it was a developer preview, you need to first uninstall it and then install 1.11.0. Note that a new profile will also be created to avoid any collisions, meaning your old one will be wiped out.

If you want to keep your ratings and preferences, you should transfer them with the RatingFile (for 1.8) and BackupBird (for 1.8) add-ons, which are both available for 1.8 and 1.11.0. Install the extensions in 1.8 and use them to export your preferences and ratings. Then, proceed to install 1.11, install the addons, and import the settings you exported from 1.8.

Migrating from Songbird

If you currently use Songbird, now is the best time to transfer your Songbird profile to Nightingale. This functionality will only be available until there are divergences between Nightingale and Songbird in terms of the formats used to store your profile data. This means that you should migrate from Songbird before it becomes difficult or even impossible to do so upon future releases of Nightingale!

Join Nightingale – Users, Developers, Testers, Doc Writers Wanted!

Again, we’d like to ask you to become an active part of the Nightingale community. You don’t have to be a geek and/or coder to join us, we’re looking for people providing bug reports, adding ideas, and writing documentation. In terms of getting more developers, we’re especially looking for people to help out with the upcoming update to Gecko 6. Please check out the forums, or join us in #nightingale on irc.mozilla.org. In terms of the languages we need developers for, we use C++, Python, Perl, Xul, JavaScript, and CSS on the player, but we also need PHP developers willing to help us build our addons platform, featherweight, and maintain other pages. We’re growing and always looking for your help!

Build Your Own Nightly

One final note is for those of you who are brave – you can start checking out and building the sb-trunk-oldxul branch, which is a working 1.12.X (Songbird concurrent) branch for our next release. Of course, we’re still working on upgrading our Gecko version (non working as of yet, see the master branch), but we’ll be doing a few more 1.11.X releases before we achieve builds that use newer Gecko versions. To keep those of you who want the bleeding edge happy, the sb-trunk-oldxul branch is the one for you!

As building for Windows is quite tricky, we set up a step-by-step tutorial in the wiki to help you to get started. We’re looking forward to build tutorials (and distro specific packaging guides) for Linux and Mac as well. Feel free to contribute to the project by writing one after you succesfully built Nightingale yourself.

It has been quite a while since the last blog post, so here is a fresh set of updates from our current projects, as listed on the wiki:

Nightingale 1.11 is coming!

We’re giving Nightingale 1.11 its finishing touches and plan to release it this month. Nightingale 1.11 is based on Songbird 1.11.0a / Gecko 1.9.2 and provides, among other things, better performance, a play queue for temporary playlists and finally official Mac OS X support. Of course all Nightingale-specific features introduced in 1.8 still persist, like our Coppery feather, the use of the system’s GStreamer on Linux, the folder synchronization feature, playlist folders, and tons of fixed bugs!

We do not have any update infrastructure yet, so you will need to update manually after the release. If you’re feeling brave, you don’t have to wait for the release! You can try out our current development version by using the test builds (currently Windows and Mac builds are available), or by building the sb-trunk-oldxul branch on your own. If you need help building, refer to our build page or contact us on the forums or via IRC. Of course, you should feel free to contact us with any other issues as well! 😉

Nightingale 1.11 uses the Songbird namespace internally. While this fact may seem interesting to developers alone, it does improve extension porting speed and compatiblity, meaning most Songbird add-ons compatible with Songbird 1.11.0a can be ported to Nightingale 1.11 easily. Of course, this also means Nightingale 1.11 extensions can also be easily ported to Songbird.

CoMETE – Student Developers at Nightingale

The student developers announced in our last blog post are now assigned to projects. Currently they’re working on the basics for features like CD Ripping, Social and Cloud service integration, equalizer preset support, and meta-data completion based on audio fingerprints. We can look forward to an awesome set of features coming in the near future.

Other Projects

Our primary focus is the 1.11 release; there is still progress being made in other projects:

Our upcoming add-on platform, featherweight is still in development. There is progress on modeling the database, but it will need some time to complete. We hope to get all of the basic work done by the time we’ve completed our

update to Gecko 6, which is the next point on the list. There is some progress, but there is much effort needed to complete it, and we gladly accept any help on this conversion that comes our way!

We’re also investigating a partnership with Babelzilla to provide the locales for Nightingale

Especially with the conversion to Gecko 6, but for all projects in general, we’re searching for new developers to join the team. There are not only C++ specific changes and fixes needed, so don’t hesitate to join us, even if you’re not comfortable with it! We need to improve the UI (XUL) and clean up some JavaScript as well. We assure you, there is plenty of work available for everyone! 😛

We’ll release another blog post when we release 1.11, and although the blog-every-two-weeks-thing didn’t work out perfectly this time, we’ll still try to keep you as updated as possible!